After 13 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars in public spending, the Senate Hearings on Immigration are finally over.

The Senate Select Committee called Auditor General, Dorothy Bradley to testify as their final witness. She was the first witness back in October 2016, and on Wednesday, December 6, 2017 she was the last to be called back.

The majority of the hour and a half long testimony was housekeeping, with the Auditor General taking questions about her audit process which resulted in her 2011-2013 Audit Reports on Immigration. Mark Lizarraga, the Protem Chairman, also questioned her about the written comments that Ruth Meighan, a former Director of Immigration, and Maria Marin, a former Acting Director of Immigration, submitted to the Special Select Committee. Those comments were their views on the extensive recommendations that Bradley had made to address the irregularities she and her team found within the department.

Now, that they’ve gotten the testimonies from the witnesses they wanted to hear from, the Senate Select Committee will take a break and resume their work on the Second Wednesday in January of next year. That’s when they will start to prepare their report, revising as many times as they see fit, until a final draft has been produced.

That final draft, which could take months to produce, will then be tabled in the Senate, and it will become a public document. The final tally is not in as yet, but estimates are that the Senate Select Committee heard well over a hundred hours of testimony, since November 2016, when the hearings started.

Of course, there had been a call for these hearings to come to an ended at least 6 months ago. Chairman Aldo Salazar started expressing that view as far back as May 18, 2017, but the Opposition, no doubt looking for as much political mileage as they could get, pushed for the hearings to continue longer. They were assisted in that objective by PUP friendly senators.